Use the In-Place Activation Control

Using an in-place activation control requires that you set a single property. The Src property is a string that stores the path and name, or the URL, of the file displayed by AutoCAD.

An in-place activation control also exports a single method that is called either explicitly or implicitly, depending on the host context. The PostCommand method sends a string from Display.exe to the command line of AutoCAD.

In the following two procedures, you use the control from the previous procedure in a Visual Basic application and in an HTML web page.

To use the in-place activation control in Microsoft Visual Basic

1. Start Visual Studio.
2. Open a new Visual Basic Windows Application project, and name it Display.exe.
3. On the View menu, click Toolbox to show the Toolbox pane.
4. In the Toolbox pane, right click to display the context menu, and click on Choose Items.
5. In the Choose Toolbox Items dialog box, on the COM Components tab, select AutoCAD’s AcCtrl component AcCtrl.dll.
6. Click Ok.

   The AutoCAD in-place activation control is displayed in the Toolbox.

7. Draw the control on Form(1), and then draw one command button.
8. In the form’s Load event handler, set the in-place activation control's Src property to a file path. For example, if a file named colorwh.dwg is in your computer's root directory, you can enter

   Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Exception) Handles MyBase.Load
   AxAcCtrl1.Src = "C:\colorwh.dwg"
   End Sub

9. In the command button's Click event handler, call the control's PostCommand method, passing it a command string:

   Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Exception) Handles Button1.Click
   AxAcCtrl1.Focus()
   AxAcCtrl1.PostCommand ("line")
   End Sub

   Make sure that you pass a command string that is supported by your product.

   You can include a space, if appropriate, as if you were using a command in AutoCAD. For example, enter Line 1,1 10,10, and include a space after the second 10. Or enter the command Zoom 10x, and include a space after 10x.

10. Run the program.

    The in-place activation control should display the file you specified in step 8

11. Click the command button.

    The command you passed in should affect the file in Display.exe's child window.

12. Exit Display.exe.

To use the in-place activation control on a web page

1. On a typical HTML page, within a pair of Paragraph tags (<P></P>), enter a pair of Object tags (<Object></Object>).
2. Set the id attribute to Acad and the classid attribute to clsid:12490290-02E9-4B5E-BE0A-38E27EB98150.
3. Specify width and height attributes in the Object tag. Set width to 400, and height to 300.
4. Set PARAM NAME to Src and set VALUE to the URL of a file you want to view with AutoCAD. For example, enter the following text, replacing the URL values with values appropriate to your network:

   <OBJECT id="Acad" classid="clsid:12490290-02E9-4B5E-BE0A-38E27EB98150" width=400 height=300>
   <PARAM NAME="src" VALUE="http://Your_Server_Name/Your_Path/colorwh.dwg">
   </OBJECT>

5. View the HTML page in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Please note that viewing the page in IE7 or later will prompt you with a script warning which will need to be responded to appropriately.

The in-place activation control should display the file whose URL you specified in the VALUE attribute in step 4.